Wedge Salads Are The Worst

Salads. They’re the food you eat when you are too disgusted with yourself to eat the food you really want to eat. However, if you’re going to take a trip down the roughage road, you may as well enjoy it. There are a bevy of options available to you, most of them named after restaurateurs. Yet, routinely, plenty of people choose to eat wedge salads for reasons I cannot begin to fathom…

…actually it’s probably because they serve as a pretty solid vehicle for bacon, but that kind of kills my whole point here so let’s just ignore that fact for now.

I’d like to state this up front: wedge salads are not salads. They are construction projects. Oh wow, a entire quarter head of lettuce and a smattering of tomatoes that I have to mix up myself. Great. I didn’t realize that I was also an employee at this Outback Steakhouse. I hope I leave myself a good tip. I probably won’t though, because this salad I made is a bullshit pile of sadness made manifest.

What’s worse, the cornerstone of the entire salad is iceberg lettuce, the laughing stock of the lettuce world.

Iceberg lettuce is 96% water and 100% garbage. It contains more E. coli than actual nutritional value. Hell, the FDA threw in the towel 12 years ago and just said, “Fuck it, go ahead and irradiate the stuff. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll turn somebody into a Hulk or some shit. That’d be pretty dope, right? Lettuce Hulk? It’d be like the Jolly Green Giant, but for real. Come on, who’s in?“.

I know what iceberg apologists will say: aT lEaSt It HaS A gOoD CruNch. Dog food is crunchy too, but I don’t see you saddling up next to the family dog at dinner time. Hopefully. I mean, do you I guess.

Also, did you know it used to be called ‘crisphead’ lettuce? So it has a racist past, too.

A watery, once-bacteria-filled-and-now-radioactive base is just the start. Traditionally, blue cheese dressing is the default option for a wedge salad, which makes a sick kind of sense when you think about it. After all, what goes better with bacteria lettuce than moldy cheese? Blue cheese dressing is the inbred cousin of ranch dressing that should really only get a pass when it is being consumed with chicken wings and that is largely because the fried chicken is doing all of the heavy lifting.

As posited above, the only real redeeming quality of a wedge salad has to be the bacon that routinely gets roped into these lazy excuses for meals. Which, if anything, just proves how much of a team player bacon is as a food. I can’t really dispute this fact, but I would argue there are about a million better ways to get your bacon fix, so pick another one.